


what alice found there

by wreckageofstars



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: 'Yaz Searches for The Doctor In Her Own Mind And Has A Bad Time', Gen, One-Shot, Thirteen Fanzine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:22:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22088578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreckageofstars/pseuds/wreckageofstars
Summary: [“I think we're all asleep,” she whispers. “Oh god, I think we're all asleep.]Someone's got to save the Doctor from herself. Yaz is more than up to the task - if only she can remember who she is.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan
Comments: 19
Kudos: 176





	what alice found there

She opens her eyes to a burning sky.

“Is this hell?” she rasps, because it's the first thing that comes to mind. Her name is escaping her. Her life has escaped her.

“Oh no, my dear.” Kindly eyes look down at her, beneath a shock of swept back hair, white as snow. The burning sky, she realizes, blackened by smoke, is behind a window. A glass pane that reaches all the way to the ceiling, framed by bookshelves on either side. Like a library at the end of the world. “This is just the landscape, I'm afraid.”

“The landscape?” 

The man that pulls her to her feet looks very old and very frail, but his grip is strong and his fingers are cold. And his eyes—

“Where am I?” she says, taking stock of herself. Arms, legs, trainers, jacket. Soft red leather, worn in, comfortable. Familiar. Her hair is plaited down her back. “Who—”

_Who am I?_

Her name is still escaping her.

“Who are you?” she asks instead. “I’m—I’m lookin' for someone.”

“Hmm?” He wraps his frail, elegant hands around the lapels of his jacket, still smiling. “Who? Who indeed. Who are you looking for?”

Nothing will stay in her head. She reaches for a name, for a description, but it's like reaching for a bar of soap in the bath. “I—”

“A friend of yours, hmm?” he prompts, hands still on his lapels, dwarfed by the scale of the shelves behind him. Full of enough books to last a thousand years or more. She breathes in the smell of musty paper and polished wood and the faintest hint of flowers, and it's free of the smoke beyond the window, free of ash and dust.

“Yes,” she whispers, because it feels right. “A friend. Sorry, what's your—what's your name?”

“Well, I'm sure you'll know her when you see her.” His hands drop from his jacket to gesture widely at the space around them. “I suppose I'm the librarian.”

“You suppose?”

“Oh, yes, quite. Hmm. And it's a pleasure, my dear.” He takes her hand to pat it absently and turns from her, meandering.

She follows. Hell or not, it's probably better with a guide. She passes shelves upon shelves as they wander, cups of tea long-forgotten, placed precariously, books stacked on top of other books, piled high on ancient chairs and rickety tables. A maze of literature. She picks one up to look at—Blinovitch's Temporal Mechanics—and finds the last pages have been ripped out.

“I don't like endings,” a voice says from the shadows. She jumps. The book falls to her feet with a dull thud and a face emerges from the shelves beyond, boyish, guileless. The shadows slip away to reveal gangly legs and an excess of tweed.

“What you're looking for,” the man—boy? Man, she supposes, though in the dimness he could be half shadow, for all she can tell—says quietly, affably. There's a bow tie, scarlet red against the creamy white of his shirt. “Are you sure you want to find it?”

His mouth is kind, but she doesn't like the way his eyes glitter, doesn't like the way they look older than his face. 

“I'm looking for a person,” she corrects.

“You don't even know your own name,” he points out. “How could you possibly know what you're looking for?”

She wants to protest, feels the urge fight its way up her throat, but her head may as well be empty. The molten sky behind the window beats at her back. She's here for a reason. That's the only thing she knows.

“Come along, hmm?” the librarian calls from up ahead. The man in the shadows raises a finger to his lips and smiles.

“He doesn't like it when I muck up his books. Probably better if we keep this between friends,” he says quietly, melting back into the shelves behind him. “We are friends now, aren't we?”

“I don't know your name,” she says.

“All the better,” he replies, just a voice now. A shadow. “They call me the goblin, or the trickster. I prefer the wizard, honestly, but it never quite took.”

“And what would you call me?” It's a bit terrifying, having nothing behind her. She's a person, surely, with hopes and dreams and fears, but they're all vacuum and dust right now. Beyond her reach.

A name would help.

“I'd call you,” the goblin, or the trickster, says, a whisper, a breath, “very brave.”

She waits to see if he'll say anything more, but the shadows beyond her are only still. The book she'd dropped lays at her feet, abandoned. Outside, the world still burns.

The librarian calls for her again, with his thin and reedy voice.

If this is hell, it's impossibly strange.

Trailing behind him, she passes more shelves, towering like mountains. Little alcoves full of spinning globes and writing tools. Flower cuttings, fragrant, perfectly preserved.

“I had a garden, once,” the librarian says softly, when she pauses. “But nothing grows here anymore.”

She follows.

In one of the alcoves, a small man with the same glittering eyes as the trickster is sitting at a chessboard, eyeing his opponent inscrutably. The tall, black-hooded figure across from him reaches a long, skeletal hand to move a piece.

“Hello, my dear,” the chess player says in a distracted brogue, frowning. There's an umbrella propped up against his side of the table, where the handle curls rather unsubtly into a question mark. “Do hurry up and get where you're going, will you? I appear to be losing,” he says grimly.

The hair on the back of her neck stands on end. She follows.

Eventually, the librarian takes her through a door marked Special Collections. 'Staff Only', it says below, but he ushers her through without a thought, into a room that smells of oak and vinegar.

“Yes,” he says, “yes, you shall have to go through here alone, my child.”

“Alone?”

“Well,” a new voice says, “not exactly.”

She turns from the door and it closes behind her. Another man, at a paper-strewn desk—and this might really be hell after all, she thinks dryly, surrounded by nothing but blokes until the end of all time—his feet propped up, a styrofoam container of vinegared chips nestled in his lap. He waves a plastic fork at her, beckoning.

“Call me grandfather,” he says, and his hair is a shock of white curling wisps and his face is severe and intimidating and terribly kind.

 _Half an hour ago, I was a white-haired Scotsman_ , she remembers, but when she grasps for the phrase it slips from her fingers. Soap in the bath, all of it, still.

There's a window behind his head. Outside, the sky is still on fire.

“Where am I?” she asks. “If this isn't hell.”

His eyes widen comically. “Is this not hell? You could have fooled me.” His head tilts to the ceiling, oak-panelled, aching with height. “Of course, I'm not the one in charge of the landscaping!”

The ceiling doesn't reply, and his eyebrows settle, irritated.

“You were in the library,” he says, gaze returning to her, weighted, warm. “Now you're in the office. Where would you like to go next? There's a laboratory, a diner, a cafe in Paris. A cricket field, if that's your bag. Probably a good seven other places, at least, if you cared to find them.”

“I'm lookin' for someone,” she says, gazing back at him firmly, and his eyes—

“Ah,” he says, unsurprised, and his face crinkles into a smile. “Of course. You'll be wanting the tower, then. The ferryman will take you.”

“The ferryman?”

“There was a river here, once, before it flooded. A pit, too. Now hell's all around us, and the tide's coming in. But you can still cross the sea, if you're very, very brave.”

She doesn't feel very brave. She can feel her pulse pounding in her ears, aching underneath her ribs, fear like a taste at the back of her throat.

But it doesn't matter.

“How do I get there?” she whispers.

“You're only dreaming,” he says, matter-of-fact. “Go through the door.”

“There's a library behind it,” she protests.

“Is there?” His eyebrows raise again, and he sweeps his feet off the desk. The chips nearly tumble to the floor, but he grabs them underhand and places them delicately on the desk, where an oily stain begins to creep across some of the papers, scrawled over and marked. Student essays, she thinks. There are other trinkets, too; a yo-yo, an assortment of keys; a young girl, dark and lovely, and a golden-haired woman, framed carefully. A pile of cards. He scoops them up in his hand and shuffles them carelessly.

“A token for your ride,” he says kindly, pressing one into her hand with chilly fingers. She takes it reluctantly, wary of omens, but there's no Tower, no Judgement, no Hanged Man. The High Priestess gazes up at her serenely, clad in blue, her eyes dark. Familiar. Behind her, the sky becomes the endless sea.

“But that's—” she says, voice catching, looking up.

The office is empty.

The hitch of her breath echoes against the bare, hollow walls, lonely. The card trembles in her hand, until the tips of her fingers whiten around it.

She has no name, but she is very, very brave.

The door creaks as it opens, and the wind that hits her face is briny with salt. Her trainers crunch against rough sand, and she presses forward into greyness, slab-like cliffs rising like monuments beside her. The sea beckons, black and rough and angry. There's no fire in the sky, here. Only a storm on the horizon, brewing, broiling.

She grips the card tightly in her hand, against the tearing grasp of the wind. Sand crunches underfoot as she stalks forward, and soon the tide is washing over her feet. She's made it to the edge of the sea.

The ferryman is waiting for her. She catches glinting teeth underneath a floppy hat, a mess of curls. A scarf that wraps around him twice over and trails over the edge of his boat. It's poorly suited for the sea. Old and elegant, like something you'd take out for an afternoon on the Thames.

“Hello, there!” he hails. “Where to?”

She thrusts the card into his hands.

“Can you take me to her?”

There's something kind in his face, too, though his eyes are just a bit too bright.

“I'll take you as far as I can,” he promises, and the card disappears into his pocket as she clambers awkwardly into the boat. He pushes off the cragged shore, into the grey, roiling sea with a punting stick, unalarmed. “She doesn't like us too close.”

A frown pulls at her face, easily. She's beginning to get the sense that the worry she's feeling may be more of a feature of her personality than a temporary state of being. “Why?”

“Why?” He taps a finger to the side of his nose but pauses. “Do you know, I've absolutely no idea.” His eyes don’t darken, but his face does still. “She doesn’t speak to me. She doesn’t speak to anyone.”

The rest of the trip passes in silence, but for the roaring of the sea. The ferryman steers ably, despite the weather, despite the frailty of the boat. From the shore, the sea had looked endless, infinite, but as they press toward the horizon, a grey speck in the distance becomes a wavering line, becomes a tower, jutting from the water. Grey stone, wind-battered and salt-washed. She blinks, and the storm on the horizon gives way to star-blanketed night.

“This is where I leave you,” the ferryman says, as the waves deliver them to the shore. A hand shuffles in his pocket. “Here. A token for your return.”

She takes the card back, but the High Priestess is gone. Stars blink up at her from the palm of her hand, around the blackness of empty space. _Ka Faraq Gatri_ , it reads at the bottom.

“It's alright,” the ferryman says, when she looks up, afraid. “You just have to be very brave. That's it, that's all.”

“That doesn't seem very fair,” she whispers.

“No,” he says quietly. “No, it never is.”

She turns from him and climbs out of the boat, plait whipping in the wind, and the sea grips her ankles as her feet plunge into the water, tears and pulls as she makes her way onto the sand. Above her, the tower looms.

She walks forward, the card gripped in her hand, a promise. She doesn't look back.

The tower has a door, and behind the door is more salt-soaked stone, narrow corridors and winding stairs and tangled, thorny vines that clamber in through the tower's interior windows. There's a courtyard that she can't reach, a barren, dirt-strewn space in the middle, and the wind wails in through the cracks in the stone. A droning sound, like flies in her ear. Shrouded, blackened fingers, reaching for her back, and before she can blink, before she can think, she's running.

The stone echoes beneath her feet, scrapes under her fingers as she lunges around a corner, salt air stinging in her throat, behind her eyes. Fear, like a taste.

A pale, frigid hand, wrapping around her wrist.

“Not that way,” a pleasant voice says, dragging her sideways, familiar, familiar, “come with me!”

She runs and finds that she's no longer afraid. Up, up, around corners and twisting, cragged stairs, until the sound of flies is a distant memory and there's only a room and a door and a mirror. Whole, but there are impossible pieces of it shattered on the ground. A sea of glass beneath their feet.

The hand drops her wrist.

“It's you,” she whispers, relieved.

“No.” The woman turns, and she's not really a woman at all. She has the same high cheekbones and pert nose as the High Priestess, the same pale hair, the same pale hands, but her _eyes_ —

Her coat is blue, but it's washed out and dull and ragged at the edges. She smiles, but it's only wild and sharp, like the waves crashing on the shore.

“I'm not who you're looking for,” the monster says. “But I can help you find her, if you make me a promise.”

You don't make promises to monsters. That's something every child is born knowing. Something all adults are doomed to forget.

She's enough of a child, still, to remember. Enough of an adult not to care.

“I’ll help you,” she says.

Desperate enough not to care, even if she can’t remember why.

“What does it mean?” She offers her the card, palm up. “Ka Faraq Gatri.”

The monster smiles again, flat. “You won't like it.”

“I already said I'd help you. What does it mean?”

“It's Dalek. Cruddy old language.” The monster's arms swing at her side casually, and the movement is so familiar she feels cold flood between her ribs, feels nausea churn in the pit of her stomach. The monster speaks lightly. Untroubled. “It means 'Destroyer of Worlds'.”

It's betrayal, she realizes, that's sitting so sour behind her teeth, behind the emptiness in her head. But she can’t remember why.

She sets her jaw. She is, after all, very brave. “Why did they send me to you and not her?”

The monster frowns in her direction, irritated. “I am her. And she's me, and he's her, and I'm him, and we're them. Honestly, it's not that complicated.”

“But she's not you.” She feels her face twist against her will. There are tears behind her eyes, pressure, building. A kind of fission. A fracture. “I don't—remember, but I know—”

“You don't even know your own name,” the monster taunts. “How could you possibly know? How could you possibly know who I am in the dark? You've never bothered to look.” The smile slips from her face. “You like living with your eyes shut, all of you. Meanwhile, they’re stranded on the beach and I'm trapped here in the long hell, like a prisoner. Tell me, would you punish the sea for crashing into the shore? Would you punish the woods for burning? I'm only natural.”

The cold light from the stars catches hard and golden in the shift of her hair.

“So do me a favour,” she says softly, eyes sharp and gleaming. “Make me a promise. Take a trip through the looking glass, _Alice_ ,” and the monster's freezing, bony fingers wrap around her wrist, drag her closer to the mirror, “and when you get there—”

Hands at her back, and she falls into the mirror, feels cold glass give against the press of her cheek, suffocating, sharp, rippling like the sea—

“Remind her of what's on the other side,” she hears, a whisper, as the looking glass swallows her whole.

She's been through a mirror before. Flashes of memory tilt behind her eyes, the smell of pine, the sound of chalk scraping against wood. More of who she was—who she is—slotting into place. But there's no sentient universe waiting on the other side this time. Only a burnt orange sky, aflame, and—

Her estate. She knows this place, knows it like the back of her hand, she has a home, she has a name, she has a family, they're all so close, on the tip of her tongue—

She presses through the doors, tentatively. They creak, the way she expects them to, but there are no other people. No other sounds. Only the squeak of her trainers on the laminate, her own breaths, harsh. Watery orange light, trickling in from outside. Home, at the end of the world.

The lift still works. She gets off on her floor, ignoring the lonely beep as the lift car departs, impossibly loud in the absence of other noise. Other life. The hall is emptier than she remembers. Messier, too. The walls are graffitied and torn, carved up and ripped.

'NO MORE', she reads, etched into the wall, carefully, painstakingly. 'RUN FAST', beside it. 'BE KIND'.

And on the door to her flat, a sensible, no-nonsense sign hangs dejectedly from the handle. 'Quarantine', it says, in a scrawled, sketchy hand.

She steps through the door.

“Yasmin Khan!” a woman says, delighted, in the midst of cheerfully dismantling her microwave. There are two cooling cups of tea on the kitchen counter, long-forgotten. Biscuits abandoned on a plate.

The emptiness floods from the back of her head, and she almost chokes on her own sudden realness. She has a name. She has a name, and a life, and a job, and a flat, and a family, and a— 

A friend.

“Found you,” she breathes, stumbling forward, heedless of the usual rules, unspoken, flinging her arms around the Doctor's neck. Hesitant arms wrap around her, perfunctory, and she smiles. The Doctor pulls back to gaze at her, bemused.

“You know,” she says mildly. “I could have sworn I was just talkin' to you.”

“You can't have been, I was—I was in a mirror.” She closes her mouth around the odd sentence, tasting fear again at the back of her throat. Betrayal still sitting there, sour, but it will have to wait. Her chest constricts. Real or imagined or remembered, the danger exists. “I've been looking for you. There's something—something big, something old, it's been chasin' us. I think we're all asleep,” she whispers. “Oh god, I think we're all asleep. Doctor, we have to go.”

“Go?” The Doctor blinks at her, guileless. Frowns, and it's an uncomfortable expression. “I don't—well, it's perfectly safe here. Isn't it?”

“Safe? Have you looked out the window lately?”

But, actually—the curtains are all drawn. The mirror in the hallway is draped in sheets.

“Why would I look out there?” The Doctor turns her attention back to the microwave, hands fiddling. Fingers trembling, but only if you bothered to look. “Much nicer in here.”

Behind her ribs, her heart is slowly sinking.

“You can't stay here,” she says, carefully. “We have to wake up. We're in danger.”

“We’re safe here.”

“I came here to find you,” she insists through gritted teeth. “We have to go.”

The Doctor looks up and for a second her gaze is glacial, shattered ice and glass. “I can't—” She wrinkles her nose to hide her panic and ducks her face behind a curtain of hair. “I can't leave. Something—something’s invaded, something’s gone wrong here. If I leave, it all collapses.”

“It's just a dream.”

“You know it's not.”

“Who cares if it collapses?”

“I do! I built it, I—” The Doctor's hands whiten into fists, where they rest on the microwave. “It’s safe,” she whispers.

Desperation sharpens her tone, sours her stomach. _You're supposed to fix everything_ , she almost says, but it’s too childish, too resentful to voice out loud. “Look outside, Doctor.”

“No.”

“You can’t stay.” 

She knows it as certainly as she knows anything, in this place. She reaches behind her to tear the sheet from the mirror, against the Doctor's protests. Stalks toward the window, dread tangling in her stomach. There had been no time in this place, before, but she can feel its reach now, like the cold clutch of fingers at her neck and the fear of it builds behind her eyes, behind her nose, threatening tears.

“Stop it,” the Doctor warns, hands raised, but there’s no bite. She’s only afraid.

Her fingers whiten around the curtains. A betrayal for a betrayal, she thinks, as she floods the room with light. Her hand drops and she stares out at the burning sky, transfixed.

“What is it?” she asks. 

There’s a long pause, before the Doctor settles at her side, resigned. “Just the landscape,” she says, quietly. 

“I need you.”

“I know.”

Yaz presses the card into her hand, cold and delicate. On one side, the High Priestess gazes up at her beatifically. On the other, the empty space between stars sings a warning.

“You were very hard to find.”

“You were very brave to look.”

The Doctor smiles, warm and sad, though her reflection in the window has a gaze that's flat and cold and satisfied. She sighs and puts a hand up against the glass. The card, she slips into her pocket.

“It was never gonna hold for long,” she mutters. Ashamed. “I’m sorry, Yaz.” 

“It’s alright.” She stares out at the hell beyond the window. Muted, distant. Present. “You don’t have to pretend all the time, you know.”

“Easier that way.” The Doctor’s reflection stares back at them, cold and hungry. “Better that way, I think. Mostly.” 

Still.

“Can’t hold forever,” Yaz says quietly. “Can’t hold always. It’s alright. Can we—can we go now?”

“Of course we can.” The Doctor smiles at her, warm and kind and right, and takes her hand. “Just a dream, after all. Come on, Yasmin Khan. We’ve got work to do. Deep breath, and—”

**Author's Note:**

> this was my piece for the wonderful Thirteen Fanzine we released this summer! I was going to post it ages ago and predictably forgot all about it, but in celebration of the series' return, I thought this might be a good moment. (i'm also STUPID pleased that we weren't reaching all this time when it comes to this doctor's tendency to hide everything from her friends i feel vindicated in this chili's tonight omg). Anyway it doesn't make a lot of sense probably but I'm still stupidly fond of it. 
> 
> (and thanks always to hetzi for wrangling it down into an acceptable wordcount (and then letting me go over it anyway))
> 
> all the weirdest shit in here is built on top of and borrowed lovingly from Paul Cornell's Timewyrm: Revelation, which is one hell of a Doctor Who book, if you can get your hands on it. Ace and The Doctor, diving into the Doctor's own mind in search of his conscience - it's a DELIGHT and definitely a formative influence on me.
> 
> anyway, I'm so, so happy this silly little show is back on the air. I hope you enjoyed this (I'm so glad to finally share it!) and I'd really love to know what you thought!


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